Every project can have a superintendent. Each function can have a manager. All critical roles can appear filled.

And when a project gets difficult, the same small group of people can still end up making the calls that matter.

That is not a staffing gap in the usual sense. It is a concentration of capability.

A Filled Role Can Still Hide a Capability Gap

Canada’s latest construction labour data gives leaders a timely reason to look at the issue. In the 12 months to August 2026, construction employment among workers aged 55 and over increased by 28,000, or 8.9%, while employment among workers aged 15 to 24 declined by 16,700, or 6.8%. BuildForce Canada interpreted the pattern cautiously, saying it may suggest that older, more experienced workers are returning to help with project delivery or fill gaps created by contractions among younger workers. ^[1]

The longer-term renewal challenge is also substantial. BuildForce projects that growth and retirements will create an overall Canadian construction hiring requirement of 306,200 workers by 2034. ^[2]

Those figures describe the scale of workforce renewal. They do not show where the judgment required to deliver difficult work actually sits inside an organization.

For boards, contractor executives, project leaders, and HSEQ leaders, that is the harder question.

Workforce reporting necessarily focuses on numbers: vacancies, hiring, retirements, unemployment, apprenticeship intake, and expected demand. Those measures matter. They help leaders understand whether enough people are available to perform the work.

They do not, by themselves, show whether the organization has enough depth in the roles that make complex work controllable.

The U.S. market illustrates the distinction. In the 2026 AGC/NCCER workforce survey, 87% of respondents reported openings for hourly craft positions and 82% reported openings for salaried positions. Half said available candidates lacked the required skills, certificates, or licences, and 42% reported project delays caused by shortages of their own workers or subcontractors’ workers. The survey included 1,830 respondents. ^[3]

Although the survey reflects U.S. rather than Canadian conditions, the underlying distinction is broader: filling a role is not the same as having the capability the work requires.

A 2026 peer-reviewed study of 80 specialty field leaders found that top performers scored significantly higher than their peers in 17 of 22 assessed competencies. The differences covered technical capability, leadership and communication, adaptability, and job performance. The measures included identifying design errors, complying with safety requirements, managing schedules and site operations, working with project stakeholders, and repeatedly delivering profitable jobs. ^[4]

That does not mean every role needs the most experienced person in the company. It means a job title is a poor proxy for depth. Two people can hold the same position and bring very different levels of judgment, exposure, and readiness to difficult conditions.

The Risk Is Concentration, Not Age

This is why the issue should not be framed as an older-worker problem. Age is not a measure of competence, and tenure does not automatically create strong judgment.

The enterprise risk is concentration: too much of the organization’s ability to navigate difficult work sitting with too few people.

Construction research helps explain why that risk can be difficult to see. A peer-reviewed study of electrical-contracting field supervisors found a significant relationship between experience and reliance on tacit knowledge, particularly among supervisors with 20 years of experience or more. The same study found that field teams identified lack of socialization and encouragement as important barriers to knowledge sharing. ^[5]

Tacit knowledge is the part of capability that people use in practice but may struggle to fully articulate or codify. It can include pattern recognition, judgment about when an issue matters, knowledge of how interfaces behave, and the ability to interpret changing field conditions in context.

That capability can sit with a 62-year-old superintendent, a 38-year-old project manager, a specialist estimator, a commissioning lead, a safety professional, or a foreperson who understands a particular client, facility, trade, or project phase better than anyone else in the organization.

The risk appears when leadership assumes capability is spread across the organization simply because the titles are.

Growth Can Expose the Gap Before Turnover Does

A capability gap does not require someone to retire or resign. Growth can expose it first.

As contractors take on more projects, the people with the deepest experience are often the people teams seek out when sequencing changes, interfaces become difficult, a client issue escalates, commissioning exposes a problem, a critical control weakens, or a commercial decision becomes unusually complex.

If those decisions repeatedly converge on the same small group, the organization may be adding projects faster than it is adding decision-making depth.

That matters because the business can look fully staffed while its real problem-solving capacity remains concentrated elsewhere. The limitation may not appear in vacancy data, the organization chart, or a conventional workforce dashboard.

For senior leadership, this turns workforce capability into a scalability question: how much additional work can the organization absorb before the same people become the informal control point for too many projects?

The answer will differ by contractor, market, project type, and operating model. The point is not to set a universal ratio. It is to make the dependency visible before portfolio growth relies on it.

Map the Decisions That Depend on Experience

Most succession plans identify critical roles. Construction leaders should go one step further and identify critical judgment: the decisions, project phases, client relationships, technical interfaces, and high-consequence situations where responsibility is disproportionately concentrated.

A useful executive review should ask:

• Which difficult decisions or escalations repeatedly depend on the same people?
• Which project phases or high-consequence activities have only one or two people trusted to lead them independently?
• Where does project delivery depend on knowledge that is poorly documented or understood by only one team or individual?
• Which experienced leaders are supporting multiple projects because equivalent depth is not yet available elsewhere?
• If a key person were unavailable for 90 days, what decisions, client relationships, project phases, or controls would become harder to manage?
• Which upcoming retirements, project starts, promotions, or growth commitments could increase that concentration?

Those questions change succession planning from a list of replacement names into an assessment of operational depth.

This is also where workforce planning intersects with enterprise risk. Ventari Global’s Enterprise Advisory work examines how growth, transition, governance, operating pressure, and leadership capacity affect an organization’s ability to maintain control and make reliable decisions.

Knowledge Transfer Has to Begin Before the Handover

Procedures, lessons learned, standards, project records, and training materials matter. They preserve explicit knowledge and reduce unnecessary dependence on memory.

They cannot capture every element of experienced judgment.

The tacit-knowledge research is useful here because it shows both the role of experience and the importance of social interaction in knowledge sharing. Field supervisors may use knowledge that has been built through years of real decisions but is difficult to convert into a document. ^[5]

For leadership, the implication is practical: capability transfer should not begin only when someone is preparing to leave. It should be built into the work while experienced people are still available to explain not only what they did, but why they made the decision.

In practice, organizations can create that exposure through paired responsibility on complex phases, staged ownership of difficult decisions, structured debriefs after unusual events, rotations through critical interfaces, and deliberate opportunities for emerging leaders to make decisions with experienced challenge and review.

Those are not substitutes for formal competency requirements. They are ways to create the experience from which judgment can develop.

Capability Concentration

Large operations can still depend on a small number of people.

A project can appear fully staffed while its hardest decisions, specialist knowledge, and problem-solving capability remain concentrated elsewhere in the organization.

What Senior Leaders Need to See

Boards do not need a roster of every superintendent or foreperson. Executives do not need another workforce dashboard filled with activity measures.

They do need visibility where capability concentration could affect project delivery, growth, control, or enterprise value.

At a minimum, leadership should understand where material single-person dependencies exist, where successor readiness is weak, where key people are supporting multiple projects because equivalent depth is not yet available, and where planned growth or workforce turnover could materially change the organization’s ability to execute.

That does not require turning experience into a simplistic score. It requires enough evidence to distinguish title coverage from capability coverage.

For HSEQ and other high-consequence functions, the same discipline applies to people that Ventari has previously applied to controls: existence on paper is not the same as demonstrated effectiveness. See Critical Controls: Evidence Before Assurance for the related control-assurance principle.

Independent Audit & Assurance can also help test whether stated succession, competency, governance, and operating arrangements are reflected in practice when leadership needs a clearer view of organizational depth.

Count Capability, Not Only People

Canada’s construction workforce challenge is real. BuildForce Canada’s forecast of 306,200 hires by 2034 shows the scale of the recruitment and replacement task ahead. ^[2]

But headcount is only one part of workforce risk.

An organization can fill roles, promote successors, and mobilize new projects while still depending on a small number of people for the decisions that protect delivery when conditions become difficult.

That is why senior leaders should look beyond whether positions are filled and ask whether capability is deep enough to support the business they are trying to run and the growth they are trying to achieve.

The real test is not whether every box on the organization chart has a name in it. It is whether the organization can keep making sound decisions when the person everyone calls is unavailable.

References

Canadian Construction Workforce

1. BuildForce Canada, Women and Older Workers Drive National Construction Employment Gains, August 2026 LFS Finds. September 2026. Analysis of Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey data for August 2026. Accessed September 28, 2026.
2. BuildForce Canada, Construction and Maintenance Looking Forward 2026–2035: National Outlook. July 20, 2026. National residential and non-residential construction workforce outlook. Accessed September 28, 2026.

Construction Workforce Capability and Field Leadership

3. Associated General Contractors of America and NCCER, Construction Workforce Shortages Remain Acute Despite “Soft” Market Conditions as Data Centers Strain Labor Supply, Survey Finds. September 3, 2026. Workforce survey conducted July–August 2026; 1,830 respondents. U.S. data. Accessed September 28, 2026.
4. Ogundare, Ibilola, Rebecca Kassa, Omar Maali, Brian Lines, Jake Smithwick, and Kenneth Sullivan, Skillsets Differences Among Field Leaders in the US Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Trades. Built Environment Project and Asset Management, 16(3), 2026, pp. 561–577. Open access.
5. Sparkling, Anthony E., and Priyansh Dogra, Supervisors’ Reliance on Tacit Knowledge and Barriers to Knowledge Sharing in the Electrical Contracting Industry. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 147(5), 2021.

Evidence note: Canadian labour-market evidence is used for the national workforce context. U.S. survey and field-leadership research are identified as such and are used to examine capability, qualification, and field-leadership issues rather than to estimate Canadian prevalence.

Disclaimer: This article provides general commentary on construction workforce capability, succession, organizational knowledge, governance, assurance, and project delivery. Workforce, competency, safety, legal, regulatory, labour-relations, and operational requirements vary by organization, project, jurisdiction, and trade and should be assessed using appropriate professional input and organization-specific evidence.